


Hunger

by prodigy



Category: Johannes Cabal - Jonathan L. Howard
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Incest, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-05
Updated: 2013-01-05
Packaged: 2017-11-23 21:35:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/626762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prodigy/pseuds/prodigy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Please don’t tell me that I’m your brother, either,” he added in a reflective little tangent, making a face.  “I know that I’m your brother.  Everyone knows that I’m your brother.  I’d like to bypass the self-evident here.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hunger

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inabathrobe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inabathrobe/gifts).



> Warnings: sibling incest, drunken/dubiously consensual sex, and uh, vampirism.

His brother smelled like whisky and formaldehyde. Horst was settled into an armchair with a copy of a dime novel in his boxcar when Johannes came in, which wasn’t unusual by itself. It was difficult to startle Horst Cabal. He could pick out any human footfall near him whether or not he was paying attention: such were the perks of his condition, if you could call them that. Johannes was always in the habit of interrupting things, too, so it was never a surprise when he failed to knock.

Horst could smell Johannes’s blood before he could smell anything else. He was hungry, of course. He was always hungry. But Johannes had retired to his compartment vexed and preoccupied and Horst had assumed he wasn’t in a mood to be generous to Horst’s hunger tonight. Horst had half a second of wondering if he’d misjudged his brother when the stench of alcohol hit him over the head like a noxious kick.

He looked up from his book. Johannes was leaning in the doorway with the door latched behind him. While Horst blinked at him he reached back and locked it. He was pink in the face from the whisky and looking at Horst with his head cocked at an odd angle: he was still dressed, apart from his jacket, but his tie was undone and looped around his neck and the first few buttons of his shirt were undone. The pinkness went from his cheeks down to his collarbone, maybe all the way to his beating red heart.

Horst’s brother was hardly a drinker and Horst hadn’t taken him for that upset over the day’s events. The smell was all wrong, too, like he’d gotten himself drunk and then went to his laboratory to botch some experiments, and _that_ wasn’t Johannes at all. No level of despair could drive him to be careless with scientific materials. Yet--here he was, breathing a little heavy with his pupils dilated wide and smelling like he’d soaked in a bath of spirits. The expression on his face was completely unrecognizable. Briefly Horst wondered if something dreadful had happened.

He closed his book and gave his younger brother a pointed look. “Hello?”

Johannes gave him one of those wide-eyed, troubling Johannes looks that always made Horst wonder if he wanted to kill him. Usually he did. Or had, anyway. In growing up Johannes had acquired a few inches of height, some dignity, self-confidence, composure: Horst could imagine now how people might find Johannes intimidating and they clearly did. For this, however, he’d traded his immortal soul and his ability to meet Horst’s gaze. He looked red around the eyes tonight.

Horst blinked and leaned back in his chair. “Are you all right?” he said. “You smell like someone tried to drown you in a distillery.”

In response Johannes reached to brush his loose tie off his shoulders. It fell to the rug behind him with a dull noise as he closed the distance between the doorway and Horst’s armchair in a few strides. Horst didn’t bother to flinch or tense up; even hungry he was exponentially quicker than his brother. If Johannes meant to do him violence he’d know before he raised his hand. So he just watched him with a cocked eyebrow, which did not prepare him at all for Johannes leaning his weight on the chair’s other arm and then swinging his legs over to one side to sit down on Horst’s lap.

Vampiric reaction time was of the remotest use only when Horst had a reaction in mind. He did not. He stared at Johannes, completely baffled by him and the hot weight of his body and the sound of his living heart.

“What are you _doing_?” he said.

Johannes unbuckled his braces and shouldered his way out of the straps with an impatient shrug. He reached for his next shirtbutton with clumsy fingers. He peered at Horst with half-lidded eyes. “What does it look like I’m doing?” He was slurring terribly: his words were all running together and his pulse was racing like a prey animal’s. Physically he was all self-possession, though, and tilted his head back at a lofty angle as he unbuttoned his shirt. It bared his throat disturbingly.

“Have you lost your _mind_?” Horst did sit up at that and held his hands out with the intention of putting them on Johannes’s arms and removing him. “What do you think that you’re even--”

Johannes pre-empted him by resting his own hands on Horst’s shoulders, idly, and Horst froze. He frowned at Horst’s frothy costume cravat like it was a puzzle of Daedalic proportions. “Be quiet,” he said, very precisely so it sounded more like _be-quiet_ , “and don’t be stupid.”

It was all too much to sort out at once. The proximity of his heart and the flush on his throat, and the heat, all too close: Horst reminded himself that Johannes was approximately ten sheets to the wind and had evidently gone completely mad in the interim, so when he closed his hands over his younger brother’s wrists he managed to keep them from shaking. He could feel the pulsepoints under his thumbs. God damn him. “You’ve had too much to drink,” said Horst.

“Please don’t,” said Johannes with a supercilious eyeroll. He took a long pause like he had to remind himself how the German language functioned. He probably did. “Please don’t try to tell me that you don’t think about this,” he went on, stumbling over the last few words, “because I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t _one-hundred-percent-certain_ that you do. All of the time. You’re sort of a horrible person.” He blinked. “I’m sort of a horrible person too,” he said. “Well, no. I’m a completely horrible person. Please don’t tell me that I’m your brother, either,” he added in a reflective little tangent, making a face. “I know that I’m your brother. Everyone knows that I’m your brother. I’d like to bypass the self-evident here.”

Horst bit the inside of his mouth. “You’re completely smashed,” he said. “I have no idea how you aren’t unconscious.”

“Yes? You’re hardly stopping me,” said Johannes under his breath with a malicious little smile, and tugged his hands out of Horst’s grip to prove his point, “and you haven’t even--had--anything to drink.”

Horst stopped him with his fingers closed around Johannes’s forearms this time, to prove his point. Without thinking he bared his teeth at him. “Don’t mock me, Johannes.”

“No,” said Johannes. He laughed at his own reply, too, which was an odd sound coming from him, harsh and a little strangled. When Horst glared at him he looked offput, which gave Horst hopes that he’d be able to put him to bed with a nasty hangover and hopefully also a nasty blackout to look forward to, but then he leaned back and gave Horst a glance of assessment. He looked put out for a moment or two, like an experiment of his wasn’t working. Then he leaned in and kissed him.

Horst stiffened and didn’t return it. But he didn’t displace him, either. Johannes’s lips were warm, his tongue hot and clumsy in Horst’s mouth; he was bright pink now, his heart was going worryingly fast, and it was very obvious that he was an incredibly incompetent kisser. Horst tightened his grip on his brother’s arms without thinking and Johannes shifted so he could move one of his legs and straddle his lap. That shook him out of it: Horst stopped and thought, _what in the name of **God** am I **doing**_ and broke away from him.

“You _are_ cool,” Johannes was saying, half to himself, it looked like. He was looking at the ceiling, unfocused. “It’s a little strange. That’s all right. You retain body heat, I know you do. You’ll retain mine.”

Horst realized he was gripping Johannes’s arms hard enough to bruise him and let him go. Johannes didn’t seem to notice; he looked bored now and had tilted himself back on Horst’s lap, then forward again, then back again with a damnable little rhythm. “You have no idea what you’re doing,” Horst said.

“Please don’t start with _that_ \--either,” said Johannes. He went for his own buttons again. This time he seemed to have a better idea of them; his shirt was coming undone, to Horst’s unspeakable dismay, falling away to expose an alarming amount of skin. “It’s really--”

“Do you even have any idea what you’re asking me to--” If Horst had any blood left in him he would have colored. Instead he shook his head. “You have no idea what you’re doing,” he managed.

Johannes gave a very unattractive, very Johannes-like snort. His shirt was almost all the way open now and he tugged impatiently at the last button. Without thinking Horst reached up and undid it for him with two fingers; Johannes shrugged off his shirt matter-of-factly and let it fall on the floor as well. He was pallid from nocturnal living, though not as pallid as Horst, naturally, and there was more muscle on his chest and lanky arms than Horst remembered--of course there was, he’d taken up fencing and presumably gravedigging. That should have put to bed any lingering feelings Horst might’ve had a decade ago for the skinny boy who’d left him for dead.

It did not. It emphatically did not. Horst dug his fingernails into his own forehead as he held his head in his hand and tried not to look at his half-naked brother or feel the heat of his blood, neither of which was working. “You don’t know anything about--” he tried again, not sounding as convincing as he expected.

“About what? Getting fucked?” Johannes took advantage of Horst’s flabbergasted silence to thread his long fingers through his brother’s hair and trace the line of his jaw with one warm fingertip in a motion that was a little too clumsy to be seductive, or should have been, anyway. He rolled his eyes so hard when Horst kept staring that he looked like he might fall backwards off Horst’s lap. He didn’t. He fixed his gaze on Horst again, back to half-lidded.

“Don’t be a child,” he said, “Horst. Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t do anything I don’t know without knowing what I’m doing,” he slurred like this actually meant something, though he sounded very determined about it. He parted the first button on Horst’s waistcoat from its buttonhole. Horst didn’t stop him. “Oh, for God’s sake. I’m twenty-eight. We haven’t _all_ spent our years locked in a tomb.”

Horst watched him through narrowed eyes and let him do what he was doing. He fumbled more on these, anyway, which really shouldn’t have been arousing, but Horst supposed “shouldn’t have” had gone to bed with everything else, starting with the fact that his younger brother was in his lap.

“Who was he?” he asked after a moment. It was not the responsible question, but he’d exhausted all his bullshit for the evening, it seemed.

Johannes frowned and leaned his head to one side thinking about it. “Jealous?” he asked. He sounded less amused than curious. “You were dead,” he said. “I couldn’t exactly. Hm. A sorcerer,” he said. “A sorcerer, I think. Not a bad sorcerer. I mean, not a terribly incompetent one, I’m not passing moral judgment.”

Horst’s cravat went the way of Johannes’s tie and Johannes leaned in to kiss him on the neck. He bit Horst a little when he did, which was cute. Probably he thought it was seductive and aggressive of him. He couldn’t have broken Horst’s skin if he’d tried. Human teeth were a bit wretched.

Horst brushed his thumb over Johannes’s sternum and down the center of his ribcage. Johannes blinked and seemed to lose his train of thought. Horst stopped and seriously reconsidered his own actions up to this point, but found himself unable to come up with any satisfying alternatives.

He was hungry, after all.

“Then again,” said Johannes, “I suppose he wasn’t a very good sorcerer. Either.” He heaved a sigh. “Are you going to fuck me, Horst? It’s a yes or no question, and--between you and me--” He scowled, perplexingly. “I’m always doing all of the work,” he said. “It’s not remotely equitable.”

He sounded soberer, which was not the same as “sober.” Horst pinched the bridge of his nose. “You’re drunk,” he said again in lieu of any sort of compelling argument.

“Yes. I’m also your brother,” said Johannes. “And I’m a man. And you’re dead. Have I missed anything?”

Horst leaned up to capture his mouth this time, to shut him up, he told himself, though it was a complete lie. Johannes put his arms awkwardly around his neck, perhaps because he thought that was what people were supposed to do at this point. The motion bared his own throat again and Horst hissed involuntarily through his teeth. His fangs were all the way out. He placed an idle kiss at the junction of his brother’s shoulder and neck and took a fistful of yellow hair.

Johannes shrugged it off. He looked faintly amused. “I didn’t offer you blood tonight, Horst,” he said.

“You don’t have the first idea what you’re offering me,” said Horst and buried his teeth in his brother’s neck, hand clamped over Johannes’s mouth to muffle his outcry.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy New Year, inabathrobe! I saw your name on the Yuletide 2012 pinch-hitters-with-requests list and thought I might take a crack at one of your prompts. :)


End file.
